3 REASONS YOUR CHURCH SHOULD NOT BUILD AN APP

Junior Bucknor • 2 December 2018

Reduce your outlay and increase your reach

"In many churches, you’re just as likely to see members reading scripture from their phone or tablet as you are to see them reading out of a traditional hard-copy Bible"

If the above statement resonates with you then it is likely you have witnessed it or you are one of those people! "On the other hand", I hear you ask, "doesn't that statement support the notion that a church app is a good thing?"

It’s a reasonable question, afterall mobile apps can be incredibly powerful platforms. But before you make a decision to head down that road why not check out these three reasons (I could give you more) why a native app might not be the right choice for your church.

REASON #1 - PROGRESS

When I use the term "native app" I'm referring to an app that has been designed, developed and submitted to either the App Store or Google Playstore which is then downloaded by users to their smartphone or tablet. For a long time there were a number of functions that could be carried out on a native app that could not be emulated on a mobile website. It was also possible to use elements of native apps whilst offline. This could not be said of mobile websites

Well, the game has changed somewhat - web coding language has progressed to the point that this disparity between native apps and web-based platforms no longer exists - enter Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

PWAs are essentially a hybrid between a native app and a mobile-friendly website, giving the end user all the functionality of an app with the ease of access and wide-reaching capabilities of a website. They have a reduced outlay, with a PWA costing less than half of what it would cost for a native app and a far wider user base due to cross-platform capabilities

  1. No need to go to an app store and download; users access the PWA straight from their browser and simply save the icon to their homescreen for future use
  2. No precious memory space taken up on the user's phone; PWAs are around 20 times lighter than your standard native app
  3. Push notifications? - Yep PWAs can do that!

REASON #2 - DECLINE

it would be advisable to consider the actual data and statistics regarding native apps

  • Between the App Store and Google Playstore alone there are over 4 million apps available - if that isn't market saturation then please tell me what is!
  • While UK stats show that most people have around 80 apps installed on their smartphone 90% of their "app time" is spent on their top 5 apps
  • Stats in both the UK and the US mirror the same results - as much as 67% of smartphone users download zero apps per month . Zero!
  • 60% of apps in the Google Playstore have been downloaded zero times!
All the stats point to one thing. We're downloading and using fewer apps than ever - there is a stark and obvious decline in native app usage and this will continue as the adoption of PWAs grows. In fact, according to Gartner, by 2019, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps

REASON #3 - AUDIENCE

When comparing the top 500 mobile web properties to the top 500 mobile apps, comScore found that the website audiences were 2.2 times larger than the app audiences. This tells us that having a website is actually much more important than having a native app. A PWA ticks the box on both terms - they are discovered, accessed and ranked just like a website but have the capabilities of a native app.

"The future of mobile is in PWAs"

To find out more about PWAs CLICK HEREFOR A BONUS GUIDE ON PWAs AND WHY IT MIGHT BE A BETTER OPTION THAN A NATIVE APP

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